Entering Joanne by Angela Stork

Mind out of the gutter, people! There’s a perfectly logical, non-sexy explanation for that title. This is the story of a colony (assuming that’s the right word) of spiders, and an attempt by Angela to explain the disgusting statistic that an average person will eat 8 spiders in his or her lifetime while asleep. Come to think of it, based on my completely limited knowledge of spider activity, I’m pretty sure she used an ant colony here and went with spiders instead, but it’s such a great story that artistic license is easily explained away. She weaves between the story of these spiders and their tyrant queen to the rocky relationship between the sexually frustrated Joanne and her boyfriend Kenny to other people in the building and other spiders in the colony effortlessly. And come on, how often do you see a book that’s about 3/4 drawings of spiders, some with comical feminine eyelashes and/or a silly moustache? Great stuff all around, really really great if this is a first effort (first one I’ve seen from her, anyway). And I’m always a sucker for a lack of resolution in an ending, so kudos on that as well.